“Indiana's new law offends me. No individual, regardless of where they
live or whom they love, should suffer discrimination. I urge state
leaders in Indiana to take swift action to prohibit discrimination and
reverse the damaging impact of this law. Oregonians continually
demonstrate a strong belief in fairness and equal treatment under the
law. As recently as 2013, Oregon voters have defeated proposals similar
to Indiana's law, underscoring our shared values and rejecting
discrimination. I encourage Oregonians to join me in expressing their
concerns about this erosion of individual rights in Indiana and anywhere
it may occur.”

The U.S. Justice Department on Monday sued
Southeastern Oklahoma State University, charging that it denied tenure
to Rachel Tudor, effectively firing her in 2011, over her identity as a
transgender woman.
The suit is a strong federal endorsement of the idea that transgender status can be a cause for illegal discrimination.
Tudor was hired in 2004, at the time identifying as a man. In 2007,
she started to present herself as a woman. The Justice Department
lawsuit outlines a series of issues that point to discrimination against
her in a tenure bid.

The U.S. Justice Department has sued Southeastern Oklahoma State
University, alleging it discriminated against a transgender professor,
Reuters reports.
According to the lawsuit, Rachel Tudor, an assistant professor of
English, was denied tenure because of her gender, and then was fired
when she complained. “The university is confident in its legal position
and its adherence to all applicable employment laws,” the university
said in a statement.

Faculty members at Sweet Briar College voted no confidence in the
college’s president and Board of Directors on Monday, echoing a vote
they took two weeks ago opposing the college’s closure. The News & Advance, a Lynchburg, Va., newspaper, reports
that a college spokeswoman, Christy L. Jackson, said the administration
was “surprised and disappointed” by the vote, which occurred on the
same day the Amherst County attorney sued the college, seeking to stop it from closing.

I
spent much of my writing life “going it alone,” and though I still
managed to publish articles and books, I now know that my solitary
approach made that life harder — and lonelier — than it needed to be.
Joining an academic writing group can make all the difference in your
scholarly career.
Trouble is, most advice on creating and using writing groups is
geared toward fiction writers. Academic writers need something
different.
Fiction writing groups tend to focus on content and critique,
and members often read their writing aloud for others to evaluate. That
kind of “workshopping” -- in which a bunch of people give off-the-cuff
(and sometimes conflicting) feedback about what you’ve written -- is not
what academics need. Thanks to the peer-review process, faculty
manuscripts receive no shortage of feedback. Papers by graduate students
are (or should be) critiqued by their advisers and mentors prior to
submission. Meanwhile faculty members often seek guidance on their
written work from trusted colleagues, mentors, and peers.
- See more at: https://chroniclevitae.com/news/955-don-t-go-it-alone#sthash.T8U9jM51.dpuf

I spent much of my writing life
“going it alone,” and though I still managed to publish articles and books, I
now know that my solitary approach made that life harder — and lonelier — than
it needed to be. Joining an academic writing group can make all the difference
in your scholarly career.

Fiction writing groups tend to focus
on content and critique, and members often read their writing aloud for others
to evaluate. That kind of “workshopping” -- in which a bunch of people give
off-the-cuff (and sometimes conflicting) feedback about what you’ve written --
is not what academics need. Thanks to the peer-review process, faculty
manuscripts receive no shortage of feedback. Papers by graduate students are
(or should be) critiqued by their advisers and mentors prior to submission.
Meanwhile faculty members often seek guidance on their written work from
trusted colleagues, mentors, and peers.

The median base salaries of professional staff members on college
campuses rose by 2.2 percent in 2014 — a rate of salary growth that was a
tenth of a percentage point higher than the previous year, according to
the results of an annual survey released on Monday by the College and
University Professional Association for Human Resources.
The increases for academic professionals at public colleges were
slightly greater than that at private institutions, at 2.3 and 2.1
percent, respectively. The figures below reflect the salaries of more
than 186,000 academic professionals at 1,104 public and private colleges
nationwide. A dash indicates insufficient data. View recently released
survey data on the salaries of tenured and tenure-track professors at four-year colleges, and senior college administrators.

Monday, March 30, 2015

The Chronicle of Higher EducationMarch 28th, 2015Hilary Bowie remembers when she made the
mental jump from being a college student to being a member of her
college’s Board of Directors. It was at her first board meeting, in
November 2012, six months after she had graduated from Sweet Briar
College.
The college had announced a new strategic plan
a year and a half earlier. Ms. Bowie, then a junior, had been taken in
by the upbeat language in the title: "A Plan for Sustainable
Excellence." Her college, already excellent, was going to get even more
excellent. There was a plan — a beautifully worded one, at that.
Sitting in her first board meeting, Ms. Bowie realized that the words
in the plan didn’t really mean much. It was the numbers that counted.
Sweet Briar had missed its target numbers for enrollment and per-student
revenue, explained Jo Ellen Parker, then the president. The college
really needed to start hitting those numbers, the president told the
board.

Today Harvard faces a serious governance problem that requires
institutional change. When we first came here, the university was
organized on the constitutional principle: “Each tub on its own bottom.”
This meant first of all that each of the component schools (arts and
sciences, medical school, law school, and so on) had not only a high
degree of budgetary independence but also that its faculty and dean had a
large measure of autonomy. And at the level of the schools such
administrators as there were worked under the direction of the dean and
in close cooperation with faculty committees. Correspondingly, the
central administration was very small: There were four vice presidents
to oversee administration, alumni affairs and development, finance, and
government relations, and a general counsel.
In 1991, when Derek Bok left office after 20 years, there was no
provost. The president managed his academic duties alone, with a small
ministerial staff. He chaired the ad hoc committees that considered
permanent appointments, read the supporting materials, heard the
witnesses, and submitted his conclusion to the governing boards. The
president’s establishment was small, so of necessity much of the
business of the university — academic and administrative — was conducted
at the level of the individual faculties. There, individual faculty
members took on many of these administrative tasks, though not always to
their delight.

Oh Dorothy, we are indeed in Kansas. Under a bill pending
in the state’s Legislature, public-college and public-university
employees in Kansas would be barred from using their official titles in
newspaper opinion articles written in their capacity as private
citizens.
The bill
would prohibit public postsecondary employees in the state from
“providing or using [the] employee’s official title when authoring or
contributing to a newspaper opinion column.” But … don’t worry. The
restriction applies “only when the opinion of the employee concerns a
person who currently holds any elected public office in [the] state, a
person who is a candidate for any elected public office in [the] state,
or any matter pending before any legislative or public body in [the]
state.”
Given various pressing issues likely to need attention in Kansas,
it’s reassuring to know that the bill’s sponsors are hard at work to
make sure that hapless elected officials are protected from bullying by
public-college and -university employees.

Right-wing legislators and pressure
groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council continue their push to
expand “right to work” across the country, though it appears Wisconsin
will be the only state to enact it in 2015.

Such laws allow private sector
workers represented by unions to dodge paying their fair share of dues.
Wisconsin becomes the 25th state with such a law; the previous two were Indiana
and Michigan, both in 2012.

According to the National Conference
of State Legislatures, related bills were introduced in 20 states last year. Visit their
database to track the progress of this year’s legislation. Here’s
the status of some of 2015’s crop:

The Missouri House approved a
right-to-work bill, and a different version is scheduled for Senate debate, but
Democratic Governor Jay Nixon has said he will refuse to sign any such law.

Right-wing
legislators and pressure groups like the American Legislative Exchange
Council continue their push to expand “right to work” across the
country, though it appears Wisconsin will be the only state to enact it in 2015.
Such laws allow private sector workers represented by unions to dodge
paying their fair share of dues. Wisconsin becomes the 25th state with
such a law; the previous two were Indiana and Michigan, both in 2012.
According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, related bills were introduced in 20 states last year. Visit their database to track the progress of this year’s legislation. Here’s the status of some of 2015’s crop:
The Missouri House approved a right-to-work bill, and a
different version is scheduled for Senate debate, but Democratic
Governor Jay Nixon has said he will refuse to sign any such law.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2015/03/right-work-threats-state-state#sthash.aBSq2cfF.dpuf

For many years, Ohio State University -- like lots of peer
institutions -- had an understanding with its faculty: the institution
might claim intellectual property rights to innovations, inventions and
patentable research, but scholarly works belonged to professors alone.
Now a new draft intellectual property policy is threatening that
agreement in the eyes of some faculty members. Ohio State says the
policy is preliminary and the final document will result in no new
limits on faculty property rights. But the ongoing debate and others
like it elsewhere in recent years have implications for
defining scholarly work in the digital age and for just how much of an
academic’s work -- digital or not -- his or her institution can claim to
own.
Earlier this month, an ad hoc, faculty-led committee charged with
updating Ohio State’s 14-year-old intellectual property policy presented
a draft to the Faculty Council. According to a copy obtained by Inside Higher Ed,
“All rights, title and interests in intellectual property (I.P.) are
the sole property of the university” if the faculty, staff or student
creators were “acting within the scope of their employment,” using
“funding, equipment or infrastructure provided by or through the
university,” or carrying out the research at any university facility.
(The language mimics state code on the matter.)

In his new book, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere,
Kevin Carey lays out a dystopian future for American higher education
as we know it. Colleges and universities will cease to exist, with the
exception of perhaps "15 to 50" of them, and will be replaced by the
"University of Everywhere," which will provide "abundant and free"
educational resources that for centuries have been locked up in the
monopoly enjoyed by universities. The reasons for this revolution? Carey
ascribes his predictions largely to the availability of massive open
online courses and the coming revolution in badging, or
microcredentials.
In Carey’s educational future, students will no longer need to spend
tens of thousands of dollars per year for four (or often, six) years on a
bachelor’s degree. Any courses they could take at an accredited
institution will be available for free on the Internet, and third-party
certification organizations will crop up that will attest to the
learning achieved in each of these courses. These certification badges,
in Carey’s model, will verify free or at very low cost the equivalent
education and training that students today receive in a
bachelor’s-degree program. Voila! The end of college.

Most medical researchers have a mantra about relationships with
industry, financial and otherwise: disclose, disclose, disclose. It’s a
position with which most professors (and journal editors) in other
fields -- even those without life-and-death implications -- agree. But
should colleges and universities be held to the same standard, and just
how much disclosure is enough?
Those are questions faculty members at the University of California
at San Francisco are raising this week, ahead of a decidedly
controversial medical conference co-sponsored by the university and the
Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a conservative think tank that
the professors view as anti-science and pro-tobacco. The university
meanwhile, says that such questions are important but that the event in
question is about the future of medicine, not partisan politics.

Professional positions in higher education administration saw an
overall median base salary increase of 2.2 percent in 2014, according to
a report issued today by the College and University Professional
Association of Human Resources.
The increase a year ago was 2.1 percent. Reversing a trend of recent
years, increases at public colleges and universities were greater than
those at private institutions (2.3 percent vs. 2.1 percent).
Of the various positions covered by this report, the best compensated
positions (excluding coaches) were (on average): staff physician
($148,722), followed by staff lawyer, veterinarian, pharmacist, senior
technology licensing officer. The lowest paid position was that of
student residence hall manager ($31,470 plus room and board).

Andrew Ross, a faculty member at New York University who has been a
sharp critic of the abuse of migrant workers in the construction of its
campus in the United Arab Emirates, is the target of a mysterious
investigation, The New York Times reports. An investigator has been seeking out “people to comment negatively” about him, the Times says, but has refused to disclose who hired her.
The investigation has also taken aim at a reporter, Ariel Kaminer, who co-wrote an article for the Times about the exploitation of workers in NYU’s project in Abu Dhabi, the emirates’ capital.

The Chronicle of Higher EducationMarch 27th, 2015
Faculty members at Ohio University have objected to the $1.2-million
purchase of a new residence for the institution’s president, The Athens Messengerreports. More than 80 professors wrote an open letter calling the Ohio University Foundation’s purchase a “poor use” of money.
“At a time when student debt is spinning out of control, and the
funding of higher education is in crisis … it makes no sense to
undertake such lavish expenditure,” the letter states.

Should the confidentiality shrouding students’ evaluations of college
instructors always be protected, even if it might conceal violations of
the law?
A California state court is expected to take up that question on
Thursday in response to Pomona College’s refusal to grant access to such
records to a former professor suing the college for discrimination.
Lawyers for Alma Martinez, to whom the private college denied tenure
and who was dismissed as an assistant professor of theater in 2013, are
seeking copies of students’ evaluations not only of Ms. Martinez but
also of faculty members who, unlike her, received tenure at Pomona in
recent years.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

The University of Delaware is refusing to fulfill a congressman's
request that it release information about who is funding a prominent
climate change skeptic’s research. The university is the first of seven
institutions facing similar requests to publicly deny them, citing
concerns about academic freedom. Delaware’s refusal raises important
questions about the line between protecting free inquiry and preserving
research integrity, and signals a reversal of sorts from an earlier
position on controversial research funding. And not everyone agrees that
academic freedom covers a decision to keep funding sources secret.
Last month, Representative Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona and
ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Natural Resources, sent a letter
to Delaware, expressing concerns about the ongoing work of David
Legates, a professor of climatology there. Legates specializes in
statistical methods, specifically related to precipitation, and has been
a vocal critic of the general scientific consensus that climate change
is a result of humans. He’s also alleged -- including in Congressional testimony -- that climate change science “dissenters” are systematically “silenced” by threats to their careers.

To complete her homework assignment,
Meran Hill needed total concentration. The University of Washington
senior shut the blinds in her studio apartment. She turned off the
music. She took a few deep breaths.
Then she plunged into the task: Spend 15 minutes doing e-mail. Only e-mail, and nothing else.
Soon enough, though, a familiar craving bubbled up. For some people,
the rabbit hole of Internet distraction begins with cat videos. For Ms.
Hill, who calls herself "a massive weather geek," it starts with a
compulsion to check conditions in outer space.
As Ms. Hill plowed through e-mails, the voice beckoned: If I could only just leave and go to Spaceweather.com ...
But the assignment had her trapped. After a while, she says, staying on e-mail felt more natural.

Among the many false dichotomies
fostered by the continuing debates surrounding higher education, one
that I find especially disconcerting is that which pits the professional
against the personal. While it is expressed in a variety of ways, it
boils down to this: Either you believe the purpose of going to college
is to be able to secure a (preferably high-paying) job, or you think
there is something more intrinsically valuable to be gained from the
years spent earning a degree. My question is: When did these become
mutually exclusive?
Yet believing that they are is one of the unfortunate conclusions
many people draw from the endless bickering about the value of a college
education, a debate that many believe was ignited by Ronald Reagan’s disparaging of "intellectual curiosity," and intensified with Scott Walker’s recent proposal
that the University of Wisconsin revise its mission statement to
replace references to the "search for truth" or desire to "improve the
human condition" with clear (read "practical") goals of meeting "the
state’s work-force needs." Politics aside, I doubt that either of these
officials wanted to assert that professionals need not be thoughtful or
reflective. However, that is precisely what this sort of sloppy rhetoric
implies and what continues to drive the public’s misconceptions about
higher education and the "value" it holds for our society.

I recently learned that when the
semester ends in May, nearly half of my immediate co-workers, maybe
more, will be out of a job. Of course, adjuncts like me are often "out
of a job," since our contracts go only from semester to semester. But
because I’m an adjunct in the University of Wisconsin system — the one
that’s made headlines thanks to Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed
$300-million budget cuts over the next two years — this time it feels different.
Ask the governor, and it shouldn’t feel that different. "Our
budget changes are only 2.5 percent of the total UW system operating
budget," he has said. After all, what business or family couldn’t manage
a 2.5-percent cut, right? But as others have pointed out, such a number
is so misleading that it wouldn’t pass the sniff test in any basic
course in statistics. That’s because almost all of the system’s total
operating budget is nondiscretionary, meaning the cuts must come from
the much smaller part of the budget that can be raised or lowered. In
reality, the proposal slashes state support for the university system by
13 percent and includes a 25-percent cut in funding for "essential
educational functions," such as instruction, student advising, and
programming.

Monday, March 23, 2015

At Long Beach City College—like most
colleges and universities these days—the adjuncts who do most of the teaching
earn poverty wages and never know if they’ll even have a job next semester. But
that problem wasn’t on the board of trustees’ agenda this week.

Instead the board addressed the job
security of superintendent-president Eloy Ortiz Oakley. He already had a
contract through 2017—but at his urging they agreed to extend it further, to
2019.

Oakley gets paid more than U.S. Vice
President Joe Biden.

This kind of professional disregard
toward the concerns of the staff is just one of the reasons why frustrated
faculty on February 25 joined the first-ever National Adjunct Awareness and
Walkout Day.

At
Long Beach City College—like most colleges and universities these
days—the adjuncts who do most of the teaching earn poverty wages and
never know if they’ll even have a job next semester. But that problem
wasn’t on the board of trustees’ agenda this week.
Instead the board addressed the job security of
superintendent-president Eloy Ortiz Oakley. He already had a contract
through 2017—but at his urging they agreed to extend it further, to
2019.
Oakley gets paid more than U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.
This kind of professional disregard toward the concerns of the staff
is just one of the reasons why frustrated faculty on February 25 joined
the first-ever National Adjunct Awareness and Walkout Day.
- See more at: http://www.labornotes.org/blogs/2015/03/adjuncts-hundreds-campuses-rally-simultaneously#sthash.UY8ECRn7.dpuf

Books, articles and talks about adjuncts typically include a long
list of what these instructors lack: decent wages, upward
mobility, office space, assurances of academic freedom and inclusion in
departmental activities, among other material and social goods.
But is the activist focus on what adjunct instructors don’t have,
rather than what they positively contribute, hurting their cause? That
was the premise of a panel here Friday at the annual meeting of the
Conference on College Composition and Communication. The topic was
particularly urgent among the rhetoric and composition instructors in
attendance, whose ranks are disproportionately non-tenure-track -- even
compared to the already high numbers of adjuncts across the humanities
and academe in general. Experts attribute the trend to the vast number
of compulsory, first-year writing courses offered by colleges and
universities, the fact that many writing instructors don’t have a Ph.D.,
and the decline of the share of the professoriate in tenure-track
positions.

SOME 4,700 full-time faculty and graduate employees at Rutgers
University overcame an intransigent management to win a tentative
contract agreement that includes dramatic wage increases for those at
the lowest ranks and a substantial modification of management's coveted
"subject to" clause used to freeze wages in 2010.
"Membership activism provided the leverage our negotiating team
needed to successfully revise management's 'subject to' clause in order
to guarantee our raises cannot be frozen at whim. While we were not able
to achieve all of our goals, on balance we think this is a good
contract," wrote Professor Lisa Klein, president of the Rutgers chapter
of the American Association of University Professionals-American
Federation of Teachers (AAUP-AFT).

Here at bucolic Sweet Briar College,
equestrians awaken at dawn and trek to the stables to ride on 18 miles
of trails through wooded countryside, fields and dells. Women study on
the boathouse dock at sunset, as geese squawk over a lake. Pearls are
still in fashion, and men must have escorts. Students call it “the pink
bubble.”

Now, all of a sudden, the bubble has burst.

The abrupt decision this month by the Sweet Briar board to close
the 114-year-old women’s liberal arts school at the end of this term
“as a result of insurmountable financial challenges” — with no advance
warning to students, parents, alumnae or professors — has transformed
this tranquil community into a hotbed of anger and activism.

Will it hurt my chances for a
tenure-track job to have adjunct work on my record?

There is a lot of anxiety out there
about that question, and a lot of what I consider undue paranoia. Adjunct
teaching does not typically harm anyone’s chances of getting a tenure-track
job, at least in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, at this point,
adjuncting may well be almost an expected part of a successful candidate’s
record.

Despite its terrible reputation,
adjunct work is evidence that you’ve taught a course entirely on your own, and
that type of experience is a critical element of a competitive candidate’s
record. No amount of TA-ing, even at highly ranked universities, will
substitute. The fact is, teaching one course on your own at a local college
counts for far more on your record than four semesters of TA work at your
doctoral institution. Because TA-ing is, fundamentally, not teaching. (Unless
of course your institution is one where TAs actually teach a whole course on
their own, in which case that experience is as valuable as any other
sole-teaching experience. If that is your situation, make sure your application
materials identify you as the instructor of record for those “TA-ed” courses.).